More Information

Exclusive: My son the Tin Man

Published: Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 1:00 a.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 10:03 p.m.

Angela Thomas leaves her Tampa halfway house promptly at noon, dressed in the nicest of her four outfits: khaki pants and a plaid shirt she bought from the Goodwill next door for such a special occasion.

Facts

ONLINE EXTRAS

She has been granted precisely six hours for the journey south, over the arc of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge to Sarasota, where she once lived a double life, and where today her son is starring in "The Wiz," the final musical of his high school career.

Treyvon Thomas, 18 and a soon-to-be high school graduate, doesn't know she's coming.

Angela, 40, wears comfy black slippers during the ride and tucks her red heels into her purse. She stops at a delivery truck on a busy corner, where a woman sells 25 roses in buckets for $10. White roses, a gift for the star, Angela explains.

Today is the first outing for Angela, who has been in prison for eight years. In that time, she has missed Treyvon's birthday parties, holidays, his performances, the moments that should have been happy.

But she will not miss this.

The mother of three stares in the car mirror, rubs on her lipstick and vows to calm herself. Finally, she whispers to nobody in particular, "Mama is coming."

Intoxicating process

Treyvon, a popular student with a gregarious nature and unfettered optimism, discovered acting at Sarasota's Gocio Elementary, a school that infused the arts into the classroom.

When Treyvon was 10, his dance teacher encouraged him to participate in a theater summer camp, where his mother watched him perform in "Godspell Junior."

That was the only time Angela saw him on stage.

His talent surprised everyone. Treyvon came from a family where men dreamed of glory in the NBA or NFL, not on Broadway.

But performing just clicked.

"I felt like I had a purpose," Treyvon says. "That's what gave me that focus."

Treyvon found the production process intoxicating -- rehearsals, scripts, lighting, choreography. Even more, he savored finding new ways of moving his body, expressing himself to tell a story. He reveled in the hours as he perfected every detail, the sweat dripping down his face in sauna-like dance studios.

Treyvon is a dancer, graceful yet athletic, with sinewy muscles built from leaps in the air and the strain of pirouettes.

"I felt like every time you perform or you even go into the artistic process, you discover something new," he says, "new things about yourself, things you thought you couldn't do before."

Treyvon kept acting through middle school and then high school. His profile soared during his freshman year at Booker High when the lead student was suspended a week before opening night. Another actor's misfortune became Treyvon's opportunity.

He had days to study the part, while the rest of the cast had practiced for weeks. It was rare for a ninth-grader to get a main role anyway, which only added to the pressure.

But Treyvon, 15, nailed it. Opening night went off without a hitch.

He was hooked.

Now, Treyvon sings Broadway songs in the car with his friends and samples local theater. So captivated by a recent show, he was late to his own 18th birthday party.

His senior year, Treyvon landed the role of the Tin Man in "The Wiz," a spin-off of the "The Wizard of Oz."

A double life

Before Treyvon was born, Angela began chronicling her relationship with her son in a pocket-size pregnancy planner, now a pale yellow volume worn by time.

"First morning sickness," reads the initial entry on July 31, 1994.

"I'm excited about my new baby!!" she wrote -- hearts for exclamation points -- in the first trimester.

The entries move swiftly from a chronicle of pregnancy to a diary that foretells heartbreak.

The drugs begin to permeate her writing.

At the start of her third trimester: "Have been getting f----- up. I better quit that s---. Help me Jesus!"

March 25, 1995, the day after she gave birth to Treyvon, her middle child, her only son:

"I'm so happy."

She began living a double life.

For 10 years, Angela was in and out of jail, though still in her children's lives.

She was a single mom who baked lasagna in a modest home near the beach, a mom who cuddled in bed as the crew watched "Family Guy." She told her children she had jobs that didn't exist or which she had long before quit. But all the while, she was selling drugs.

Her secret life ended in August 2005, when Angela and a friend boarded an Amtrak train with five kilos of cocaine.

They were arrested and accused of drug trafficking at a train depot in El Paso, Texas.

Angela, 33 at the time, wept when the sentence rang through the courtroom. Ten years. A decade away from her three children: How would they survive without their mother? Who would love 10-year-old Treyvon?

Letters from prison

Nobody explained to Treyvon or Samoney, his baby sister, what happened that summer day on the Amtrak.

When her mother never came home, Samoney thought she had gone to college.

Treyvon says he just "put 2 and 2 together."

"I was young. I didn't know what to feel," he says. "I was angry. I was betrayed. I felt hurt. I was confused.

"I felt lost."

From prison, Angela made attempts to connect. Phone calls were too expensive, visits were scarce, so Angela peppered Treyvon with advice in letters.

Dream big. Don't scratch your chicken pox. Read the Bible every day. Be nice to your sisters, even if they get on your nerves as only sisters can.

She feared she was losing her only son. Already, Angela's eldest daughter, Kionne, ignored the letters and calls.

Angela begged to know Treyvon's favorite color, the name of his best friend, how he felt about her being in prison.

On Easter or birthdays, Angela traced pictures of Tweety Bird and SpongeBob SquarePants. She put on pink lipstick and kissed the envelopes for her children.

Her family couldn't be together, but the one thing they could do was pray.

"No time or space can stop us from doing that together," she wrote in March 2008.

Things would get better, Angela promised.

"Just know that hard times, sad times and confusing times will come in life," she wrote. "They are designed to cause you to give up, run away and do foolish things, but son, you have to bloom where you are planted."

The letters are stored deep on a shelf in Treyvon's great-aunt's garage, in a cardboard box filled with Pokemon memorabilia and elementary school awards.

Hearing the truth

Over the years, Treyvon and his younger sister were shuffled among relatives in Sarasota until Samoney, the youngest, moved in with big sister Kionne, who was away at college in Kansas.

Treyvon's father lived nearby, but was absent from his son's life. He died when Treyvon was in eighth grade.

For a while, Treyvon lived with his grandmother, then a great-aunt. Two years ago he moved in with another great-aunt who is raising three children of her own in a middle-class neighborhood off North Lockwood Ridge Road. Space is tight, and Treyvon shares a bedroom with his cousin.

With some financial help from a family member, Treyvon visited his mother at a prison in West Virginia in 2010. He remembered her as kind and loving, filled with laughter and magnetism -- all things he inherited.

He asked for the truth.

She told him about the day on the Amtrak, and all that led to it.

"She told me it was drug trafficking," he says. "She had it in a suitcase as they were on their way back to Florida."

Treyvon says she told him all he needed to know.

"It happened, I guess," he says. "Now it's almost over. Ignorance is bliss."

During that prison visit, Angela told her son that she, too, grew up without a mother. She told him that at 13, her childhood ended when she became pregnant with her first child, that she dropped out of school and fell into drugs and a string of bad relationships with abusive men.

She told him that she was sorry.

Masks and demons

During Treyvon's sophomore year, everyone in his theater class wore the same blank white masks.

It was a classroom exercise to force the students to rely on their body movements -- not their faces -- to tell a story.

In a quiet voice, the teacher said a word to prompt the students, identical in their masks.

The word was "supplication" -- meaning an earnest request.

But Treyvon misheard.

Suffocate.

He was suffocating.

The mask was clamping down on him.

He ripped it off and burst into tears.

His screams frightened students, one of whom thought he must be hurt. Treyvon ran out of the classroom, down the hallway and outside.

In theater, students pulled from their past -- the hurt, the joy, the sadness -- and used those emotions to find the humanity in the characters they portrayed on stage. It was almost like therapy. But this day, it had gone too far. The exercise pulled something deep from him.

His dance teacher, Cynthia Ashford, chased Treyvon, grabbed him and hugged him tight.

"What were these demons inside this kid?" Ashford wondered.

Later, Ashford thought about becoming Treyvon's foster parent. When she moved into a new house, she asked him if he would move into her spare bedroom.

Treyvon declined and said he was OK.

Back to Florida

On the ride to Sarasota, about 30 minutes from the halfway house, the red heels are still tucked in Angela's purse. Nervously, she grips the theater ticket. "The Wiz," it reads. "Saturday April 13th at 2 p.m."

It's 12:45 p.m. Angela marvels as the pelicans and seagulls swoop and bathe under the hot sun, a scene she has dearly missed.

This is the first time she has gone anywhere fun in years.

On Feb. 25, she left prison and rode the Greyhound bus from West Virginia to the Tampa halfway house.

Freedom, if you can call it that, came two years early because she completed drug rehabilitation and earned certificates in business and customer service.

She loathes Tampa. The halfway house staffers get angry if she's late, and her job -- she calls people and tries to convince them to renew magazine subscriptions -- pays $7.80 an hour. At the halfway house, greasy men talk about how much they want sex.

But it's a place where she talks for hours with her children without using the costly prison pay phone. And the job is money for Treyvon's graduation present and a driver's license.

In her wallet, she keeps her arrest mug photo.

Defying the odds

Booker High School Principal Rachel Shelley has 985 students. A handful of names are on an unofficial monitoring system where she looks for missed classes and slipping grades.

Despite being a model student, Treyvon is on her list.

As she puts it, Booker will not let him fail.

Treyvon has a tenacity and a work ethic that Shelley can't explain.

"Innate? Genetics? I have no idea," she says. "He's one child that defies every single statistic when it comes to identifying, judging at-risk students."

As president of the National Honor Society, Treyvon is a "model student," with an A-plus grade-point average -- 4.3 on a 4.0 scale.

With ease, he excels in tough classes such as advanced placement biology and calculus.

Going to prom proved more difficult.

He offered to collect garbage at Booker because he couldn't afford prom tickets.

Shelley gave them to him for free. Like so many teachers at Booker, she knows his story. Teachers have bought his clothes, school supplies and lunch here and there.

The previous school year, Shelley noticed Treyvon squinting hard when he looked at the board. It had been years since he'd had his eyes checked, so Shelley connected him with a program that paid for an eye exam and glasses.

His teachers know the system -- how to get scholarships for programs and trips -- so Treyvon's summers are spent at acting camps and dance lessons, or on trips to see new places. One year, he went to Ireland to study with his classmates.

Treyvon does not complain, friends and teachers say.

His modesty and hard work contribute to his popularity.

His classmates voted him homecoming king. His friends threw surprise birthday parties and had him over for Christmas, where their families gave him gifts and made his favorite meal, mac and cheese.

'That's my baby'

Angela ditches the slippers for her red heels, which she dubs her "Dorothy shoes," and marches toward the dull roar of parents outside the theater, shuffling in. The theater moms are waiting for her.

One of them, a stranger to Angela but not to her son, greets Angela with a hug and hands her a box of tissues attached to a card.

With a shriek, Angela reads the note.

"Class of 2013 ... theater mom!"

She presses the gift to her chest.

Inside, Angela is greeted with more hugs from strangers who know all about her. Moms, elementary school teachers, high school teachers, Treyvon's classmates. Many of them are complicit in the plan to surprise Treyvon backstage after the show.

She grabs a program.

Ten minutes before showtime, as everyone is sitting down, Angela makes a scene.

"Yes, the Tin Man is my son," she explains as she disrupts those in her row, a long line of the calm and proper and elderly.

She does not fit in.

"Yes, My son is the Tin Man," she says again, for good measure.

She takes her seat and opens the program.

"What's an intermission?" she asks.

Angela sees her son's bio. She's surprised by the many accolades.

"That's my baby."

The clamor fades as the lights dim. The curtain is up.

Angela rests her elbows on her knees and grips the tissues like a stress ball. She leans toward the stage, perched in her seat.

Painted silver and shiny, an axe around his waist, Treyvon appears on stage.

"Oh my God," Angela whispers through her hands. "Treyvon."

For a moment, she hides her face beneath the program, as if Treyvon might pick her out of the crowd.

The Tin Man is frozen in a garbage can when Dorothy and the Scarecrow stumble upon him. They retrieve his oil can, which segues into his big song and dance number.

The Tin Man manages a backward head-over-heels worm move. He glides across the stage like Michael Jackson. A heel click. A serpentine jive.

Soon, Treyvon will attend Northwestern University outside Chicago. He won the prestigious Gates Millennium Scholarship, which is more than a full ride. For him, school could be entirely paid for, all the way up to a doctorate if he wants it.

Angela, a few credits short of an associate degree because she took classes in prison, is moving back to Sarasota to start over.

But that's the future. For now, the two are hugging and dancing in the mostly empty auditorium. The audience has left, and castmates have begun to trickle out.

<p>Angela Thomas leaves her Tampa halfway house promptly at noon, dressed in the nicest of her four outfits: khaki pants and a plaid shirt she bought from the Goodwill next door for such a special occasion.</p><p>She has been granted precisely six hours for the journey south, over the arc of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge to Sarasota, where she once lived a double life, and where today her son is starring in "The Wiz," the final musical of his high school career.</p><p>Treyvon Thomas, 18 and a soon-to-be high school graduate, doesn't know she's coming.</p><p>Angela, 40, wears comfy black slippers during the ride and tucks her red heels into her purse. She stops at a delivery truck on a busy corner, where a woman sells 25 roses in buckets for $10. White roses, a gift for the star, Angela explains.</p><p>Today is the first outing for Angela, who has been in prison for eight years. In that time, she has missed Treyvon's birthday parties, holidays, his performances, the moments that should have been happy.</p><p>But she will not miss this.</p><p>The mother of three stares in the car mirror, rubs on her lipstick and vows to calm herself. Finally, she whispers to nobody in particular, "Mama is coming."</p><p><b>Intoxicating process</b></p><p>Treyvon, a popular student with a gregarious nature and unfettered optimism, discovered acting at Sarasota's Gocio Elementary, a school that infused the arts into the classroom.</p><p>When Treyvon was 10, his dance teacher encouraged him to participate in a theater summer camp, where his mother watched him perform in "Godspell Junior."</p><p>That was the only time Angela saw him on stage.</p><p>His talent surprised everyone. Treyvon came from a family where men dreamed of glory in the NBA or NFL, not on Broadway.</p><p>But performing just clicked.</p><p>"I felt like I had a purpose," Treyvon says. "That's what gave me that focus."</p><p>Treyvon found the production process intoxicating -- rehearsals, scripts, lighting, choreography. Even more, he savored finding new ways of moving his body, expressing himself to tell a story. He reveled in the hours as he perfected every detail, the sweat dripping down his face in sauna-like dance studios.</p><p>Treyvon is a dancer, graceful yet athletic, with sinewy muscles built from leaps in the air and the strain of pirouettes.</p><p>"I felt like every time you perform or you even go into the artistic process, you discover something new," he says, "new things about yourself, things you thought you couldn't do before."</p><p>Treyvon kept acting through middle school and then high school. His profile soared during his freshman year at Booker High when the lead student was suspended a week before opening night. Another actor's misfortune became Treyvon's opportunity.</p><p>He had days to study the part, while the rest of the cast had practiced for weeks. It was rare for a ninth-grader to get a main role anyway, which only added to the pressure.</p><p>But Treyvon, 15, nailed it. Opening night went off without a hitch.</p><p>He was hooked.</p><p>Now, Treyvon sings Broadway songs in the car with his friends and samples local theater. So captivated by a recent show, he was late to his own 18th birthday party.</p><p>His senior year, Treyvon landed the role of the Tin Man in "The Wiz," a spin-off of the "The Wizard of Oz."</p><p><b>A double life</b></p><p>Before Treyvon was born, Angela began chronicling her relationship with her son in a pocket-size pregnancy planner, now a pale yellow volume worn by time.</p><p>"First morning sickness," reads the initial entry on July 31, 1994.</p><p>"I'm excited about my new baby!!" she wrote -- hearts for exclamation points -- in the first trimester.</p><p>The entries move swiftly from a chronicle of pregnancy to a diary that foretells heartbreak.</p><p>The drugs begin to permeate her writing.</p><p>At the start of her third trimester: "Have been getting f----- up. I better quit that s---. Help me Jesus!"</p><p>March 25, 1995, the day after she gave birth to Treyvon, her middle child, her only son:</p><p>"I'm so happy."</p><p>She began living a double life.</p><p>For 10 years, Angela was in and out of jail, though still in her children's lives.</p><p>She was a single mom who baked lasagna in a modest home near the beach, a mom who cuddled in bed as the crew watched "Family Guy." She told her children she had jobs that didn't exist or which she had long before quit. But all the while, she was selling drugs.</p><p>Her secret life ended in August 2005, when Angela and a friend boarded an Amtrak train with five kilos of cocaine.</p><p>They were arrested and accused of drug trafficking at a train depot in El Paso, Texas.</p><p>Angela, 33 at the time, wept when the sentence rang through the courtroom. Ten years. A decade away from her three children: How would they survive without their mother? Who would love 10-year-old Treyvon?</p><p><b>Letters from prison</b></p><p>Nobody explained to Treyvon or Samoney, his baby sister, what happened that summer day on the Amtrak.</p><p>When her mother never came home, Samoney thought she had gone to college.</p><p>Treyvon says he just "put 2 and 2 together."</p><p>"I was young. I didn't know what to feel," he says. "I was angry. I was betrayed. I felt hurt. I was confused.</p><p>"I felt lost."</p><p>From prison, Angela made attempts to connect. Phone calls were too expensive, visits were scarce, so Angela peppered Treyvon with advice in letters.</p><p>Dream big. Don't scratch your chicken pox. Read the Bible every day. Be nice to your sisters, even if they get on your nerves as only sisters can.</p><p>She feared she was losing her only son. Already, Angela's eldest daughter, Kionne, ignored the letters and calls.</p><p>Angela begged to know Treyvon's favorite color, the name of his best friend, how he felt about her being in prison.</p><p>On Easter or birthdays, Angela traced pictures of Tweety Bird and SpongeBob SquarePants. She put on pink lipstick and kissed the envelopes for her children.</p><p>Her family couldn't be together, but the one thing they could do was pray.</p><p>"No time or space can stop us from doing that together," she wrote in March 2008.</p><p>Things would get better, Angela promised.</p><p>"Just know that hard times, sad times and confusing times will come in life," she wrote. "They are designed to cause you to give up, run away and do foolish things, but son, you have to bloom where you are planted."</p><p>The letters are stored deep on a shelf in Treyvon's great-aunt's garage, in a cardboard box filled with Pokemon memorabilia and elementary school awards.</p><p><b>Hearing the truth</b></p><p>Over the years, Treyvon and his younger sister were shuffled among relatives in Sarasota until Samoney, the youngest, moved in with big sister Kionne, who was away at college in Kansas.</p><p>Treyvon's father lived nearby, but was absent from his son's life. He died when Treyvon was in eighth grade.</p><p>For a while, Treyvon lived with his grandmother, then a great-aunt. Two years ago he moved in with another great-aunt who is raising three children of her own in a middle-class neighborhood off North Lockwood Ridge Road. Space is tight, and Treyvon shares a bedroom with his cousin.</p><p>With some financial help from a family member, Treyvon visited his mother at a prison in West Virginia in 2010. He remembered her as kind and loving, filled with laughter and magnetism -- all things he inherited.</p><p>He asked for the truth.</p><p>She told him about the day on the Amtrak, and all that led to it.</p><p>"She told me it was drug trafficking," he says. "She had it in a suitcase as they were on their way back to Florida."</p><p>Treyvon says she told him all he needed to know.</p><p>"It happened, I guess," he says. "Now it's almost over. Ignorance is bliss."</p><p>During that prison visit, Angela told her son that she, too, grew up without a mother. She told him that at 13, her childhood ended when she became pregnant with her first child, that she dropped out of school and fell into drugs and a string of bad relationships with abusive men.</p><p>She told him that she was sorry.</p><p><b>Masks and demons</b></p><p>During Treyvon's sophomore year, everyone in his theater class wore the same blank white masks.</p><p>It was a classroom exercise to force the students to rely on their body movements -- not their faces -- to tell a story.</p><p>In a quiet voice, the teacher said a word to prompt the students, identical in their masks.</p><p>The word was "supplication" -- meaning an earnest request.</p><p>But Treyvon misheard.</p><p>Suffocate.</p><p>He was suffocating.</p><p>The mask was clamping down on him.</p><p>He ripped it off and burst into tears.</p><p>His screams frightened students, one of whom thought he must be hurt. Treyvon ran out of the classroom, down the hallway and outside.</p><p>In theater, students pulled from their past -- the hurt, the joy, the sadness -- and used those emotions to find the humanity in the characters they portrayed on stage. It was almost like therapy. But this day, it had gone too far. The exercise pulled something deep from him.</p><p>His dance teacher, Cynthia Ashford, chased Treyvon, grabbed him and hugged him tight.</p><p>"What were these demons inside this kid?" Ashford wondered.</p><p>Later, Ashford thought about becoming Treyvon's foster parent. When she moved into a new house, she asked him if he would move into her spare bedroom.</p><p>Treyvon declined and said he was OK.</p><p><b>Back to Florida</b></p><p>On the ride to Sarasota, about 30 minutes from the halfway house, the red heels are still tucked in Angela's purse. Nervously, she grips the theater ticket. "The Wiz," it reads. "Saturday April 13th at 2 p.m."</p><p>It's 12:45 p.m. Angela marvels as the pelicans and seagulls swoop and bathe under the hot sun, a scene she has dearly missed.</p><p>This is the first time she has gone anywhere fun in years.</p><p>On Feb. 25, she left prison and rode the Greyhound bus from West Virginia to the Tampa halfway house.</p><p>Freedom, if you can call it that, came two years early because she completed drug rehabilitation and earned certificates in business and customer service.</p><p>She loathes Tampa. The halfway house staffers get angry if she's late, and her job -- she calls people and tries to convince them to renew magazine subscriptions -- pays $7.80 an hour. At the halfway house, greasy men talk about how much they want sex.</p><p>But it's a place where she talks for hours with her children without using the costly prison pay phone. And the job is money for Treyvon's graduation present and a driver's license.</p><p>In her wallet, she keeps her arrest mug photo.</p><p><b>Defying the odds</b></p><p>Booker High School Principal Rachel Shelley has 985 students. A handful of names are on an unofficial monitoring system where she looks for missed classes and slipping grades.</p><p>Despite being a model student, Treyvon is on her list.</p><p>As she puts it, Booker will not let him fail.</p><p>Treyvon has a tenacity and a work ethic that Shelley can't explain.</p><p>"Innate? Genetics? I have no idea," she says. "He's one child that defies every single statistic when it comes to identifying, judging at-risk students."</p><p>As president of the National Honor Society, Treyvon is a "model student," with an A-plus grade-point average -- 4.3 on a 4.0 scale.</p><p>With ease, he excels in tough classes such as advanced placement biology and calculus.</p><p>Going to prom proved more difficult.</p><p>He offered to collect garbage at Booker because he couldn't afford prom tickets.</p><p>Shelley gave them to him for free. Like so many teachers at Booker, she knows his story. Teachers have bought his clothes, school supplies and lunch here and there.</p><p>The previous school year, Shelley noticed Treyvon squinting hard when he looked at the board. It had been years since he'd had his eyes checked, so Shelley connected him with a program that paid for an eye exam and glasses.</p><p>His teachers know the system -- how to get scholarships for programs and trips -- so Treyvon's summers are spent at acting camps and dance lessons, or on trips to see new places. One year, he went to Ireland to study with his classmates.</p><p>Treyvon does not complain, friends and teachers say.</p><p>His modesty and hard work contribute to his popularity.</p><p>His classmates voted him homecoming king. His friends threw surprise birthday parties and had him over for Christmas, where their families gave him gifts and made his favorite meal, mac and cheese.</p><p><b>'That's my baby'</b></p><p>Angela ditches the slippers for her red heels, which she dubs her "Dorothy shoes," and marches toward the dull roar of parents outside the theater, shuffling in. The theater moms are waiting for her.</p><p>One of them, a stranger to Angela but not to her son, greets Angela with a hug and hands her a box of tissues attached to a card.</p><p>With a shriek, Angela reads the note.</p><p>"Class of 2013 ... theater mom!"</p><p>She presses the gift to her chest.</p><p>Inside, Angela is greeted with more hugs from strangers who know all about her. Moms, elementary school teachers, high school teachers, Treyvon's classmates. Many of them are complicit in the plan to surprise Treyvon backstage after the show.</p><p>She grabs a program.</p><p>Ten minutes before showtime, as everyone is sitting down, Angela makes a scene.</p><p>"Yes, the Tin Man is my son," she explains as she disrupts those in her row, a long line of the calm and proper and elderly.</p><p>She does not fit in.</p><p>"Yes, My son is the Tin Man," she says again, for good measure.</p><p>She takes her seat and opens the program.</p><p>"What's an intermission?" she asks.</p><p>Angela sees her son's bio. She's surprised by the many accolades.</p><p>"That's my baby."</p><p>The clamor fades as the lights dim. The curtain is up.</p><p>Angela rests her elbows on her knees and grips the tissues like a stress ball. She leans toward the stage, perched in her seat.</p><p>Painted silver and shiny, an axe around his waist, Treyvon appears on stage.</p><p>"Oh my God," Angela whispers through her hands. "Treyvon."</p><p>For a moment, she hides her face beneath the program, as if Treyvon might pick her out of the crowd.</p><p>The Tin Man is frozen in a garbage can when Dorothy and the Scarecrow stumble upon him. They retrieve his oil can, which segues into his big song and dance number.</p><p>The Tin Man manages a backward head-over-heels worm move. He glides across the stage like Michael Jackson. A heel click. A serpentine jive.</p><p>"Slide some oil to me," Treyvon sings. "And let me lubricate my mind!"</p><p>To close, the Tin Man does the splits.</p><p><b>Behind the curtain</b></p><p>After the show, Angela grips the white roses and is led backstage by Ashford, the dance teacher who once wanted to foster Treyvon.</p><p>She creeps beside the curtains, spots Treyvon and makes her move, a scream loud enough to startle the entire cast.</p><p>"Treyvon!"</p><p>Treyvon, still in his costume, looks up, bemused. They run to center stage and lock onto each other, sobbing joyful tears in front of the cast.</p><p>Finally, when Angela pulls away from the embrace, the two giggle. Streaks of the Tin Man's silver face paint have rubbed off on Angela's face.</p><p>As the moment fades, Angela hands Treyvon the flowers. The bouquet shrinks as Angela pulls out white roses, one by one, to give to his teachers and friends.</p><p>Treyvon introduces her to his teachers. "Look," Treyvon says. "She's real."</p><p>Soon, Treyvon will attend Northwestern University outside Chicago. He won the prestigious Gates Millennium Scholarship, which is more than a full ride. For him, school could be entirely paid for, all the way up to a doctorate if he wants it.</p><p>Angela, a few credits short of an associate degree because she took classes in prison, is moving back to Sarasota to start over.</p><p>But that's the future. For now, the two are hugging and dancing in the mostly empty auditorium. The audience has left, and castmates have begun to trickle out.</p><p>"I gotta go," she says finally, abruptly.</p><p>Treyvon needs to prepare for a second performance.</p><p>Angela must hurry back to the halfway house for her 6 p.m. curfew.</p>